- published: 04 Nov 2015
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The Lenape ( /ˈlɛnəpiː/ or /ləˈnɑːpi/) are Native American people in Canada and the United States. They are also called Delaware Indians. As a result of the American Revolutionary War and later Indian removals from the eastern United States, the main groups now live in Ontario (Canada), Oklahoma, and Wisconsin. In Canada, they are enrolled in the Munsee-Delaware Nation 1, the Moravian of the Thames First Nation, and the Delaware of Six Nations; in the United States, they are enrolled in three federally recognized tribes, that is, the Delaware Nation and the Delaware Tribe of Indians, both located in Oklahoma, and the Stockbridge-Munsee Community, located in Wisconsin.
At the time of European contact in the 16th and 17th centuries, the Lenape inhabited a region on the North Atlantic coast in what anthropologists call the Northeastern Woodlands. Although never politically unified, it is frequently referred to as Lenapehoking ("Lenape country"). It roughly comprised the area around and between the Delaware and lower Hudson rivers. Lenapehoking hosted over two dozen Lenape polities. Some of their names, such as Manhattan, Raritan, and Tappan, remain inscribed on the landscape. Based on the historical record of the mid-seventeenth century, it has been estimated that most Lenape polities consisted of several hundred people. It is conceivable that some had been considerably larger prior to contact. Even regions at a distance from European settlement, such as Iroquoia, had been devastated by smallpox by the 1640s.